Life and innumerable questions

What is the meaning of life?’ ‘What is the purpose of life?’ ‘Why are we born?’ are the questions every one in the universe must be asking from him/her self. In most cases, we have our own agenda on what our purpose in life is. However from a spiritual perspective, there are two generic reasons why we are born. These reasons define the purpose of our lives at the most basic level. They are:

  • To complete the give-and-take account we have with various people.
  • To make spiritual progress with the final aim of merging into God and therefore getting out of the cycle of birth and death.

Over many lifetimes, we accumulate many give-and-take accounts that are a direct result of our deeds and actions. The accounts may be positive or negative depending on the positive or negative nature of our actions. As a rule of thumb, in the current era approximately 65% of our lives are destined (not within our control) and 35% of our lives are governed by our own freewill. All major events in our life are by and large destined. These events include our birth, the family we are born into, the person (or persons) we marry, the children we have, serious illnesses, and the time of our death. The happiness and pain that we give and receive from loved ones and acquaintances are by and large simply a case of prior give-and-take accounts directing the way relationships unravel and play out.

 However even our destiny in the current lifetime is just a fraction of the accumulated give-and take account that we amass over many lifetimes.

In our lifetime, while we do complete our give-and-take account and destiny earmarked for this particular lifetime of ours, we also end up creating more accounts by using our willful action. This in turn finally adds up to our overall give-and-take account known as the accumulated account. As a result, we have to be born again to settle further give-and-take accounts and are stuck in the cycle of birth.

The ultimate in spiritual development in any Spiritual path is merging with God. ‘Merging with God’ means experiencing God within us and all around us and not identifying with our five senses, mind and intellect. This happens at the 100% spiritual level. Most people in today’s world are at the 20-25% spiritual level and are disinclined to any spiritual practice for spiritual development. They also heavily identify with their 5 senses, mind and intellect. This is reflected in our lives when we focus mainly on our looks or are arrogant about our intelligence or success.

 

Most of us have our own life goals. They may include becoming a doctor, being rich and famous or representing one’s country in a certain field. Whatever the goal is for the vast majority of us, more often than not, it is predominantly a worldly one. Our entire education system is set up to help us pursue these worldly goals. As parents too, we instill the same worldly purpose in our children by encouraging them to study and enter professions that give them more benefits monetarily as compared with one’s own profession.

One may ask, “How does having these worldly goals reconcile with the spiritual purpose of life and the reason for our birth on Earth?”

The answer is quite simple. We strive for worldly goals primarily to achieve satisfaction and happiness. The pursuit of the elusive ‘superlative and lasting happiness’ is intrinsically what drives all our actions. However even after we accomplish our worldly goals, the resultant happiness, and satisfaction is short lived, we then search for the next dream to chase.

‘This does not mean that we have to give up what we are doing and just focus on spiritual practice. What it does mean is that only by introducing spiritual practice in conjunction with worldly life are we likely to experience superlative and lasting happiness. The benefits of spiritual practice have been discussed in detail in our section on ‘Spiritual research for lasting happiness’.

In short, the more our life goals are in line with the intent of spiritual development, the more rich our lives become and the less pain we experience from life.

Human life is invaluable or prices less, is to be decided by us only.

Atul Malikram, chief mentor, miim, the leading image management institute of central India says” Besides guiding our students for their different courses, our faculty members make students aware of ethics of life. Being human, we should understand the very purpose of life and try to utilize it in a proper way to achieve the ultimate goal.”

To know more about miim

Please contact

Atul Malikram

 

 

 

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